Invisible Monsters Remix

by Chuck Palahniuk

  In our room of the Nelson Place Hotel, I hoped this story was only the Ecstasy happening. Franz and I didn’t officially meet until college. In 1983? Was it 1984? His bad dream wasn’t a dream, because a decade before we first met . . . we’d already met. The man getting married on top of that train had been my father, and my brother and I had been the two groomsmen. That had been the beginning of my father’s second marriage, after divorcing my mother, and he’d wanted to put on a good show. Over a decade later, Franz and I would realize that our childhoods had had that uncomfortable hour in common. Even the bagpipe? Everything.

  That’s the worst aspect of being a writer: managing plausibility. Everything else about that road trip, I could use in Invisible Monsters. But that’s the kind of actual miracle that, if I wrote it into a novel, you’d instantly cry, “Bullshit!”

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Twenty-five

  n Seattle, I’ve been watching Brandy nap in our undersea grotto for more than one hundred and sixty years. Me, I’m sitting here with a glossy pile of brochures from surgeons showing sexual reassignment surgeries. Transitional transgender operations. Sex changes.

  The color pictures show pretty much the same shot of different-quality vaginas. Camera shots focused straight into the dark vaginal introitus. Fingers with red nail polish cupped against each thigh to spread the labia. The urethral meatus soft and pink. The pubic hair clipped down to stubble on some. The vaginal depth given as six inches, eight inches, two inches. Unresected corpus spongiosum mounding around the urethral opening on some. The clitoris hooded, the frenulum of the clitoris, the tiny folds of skin under the hood that join the clitoris to the labia.

  Bad, cheap vaginas with hair-growing scrotal skin used inside, still growing hair, choked with hair.

  Picture-perfect, state-of-the-art vaginas lengthened using sections of colon, self-cleaning and lubricated with its own mucosa. Sensate clitorises made by cropping and rerouting bits of the glans penis. The Cadillac of vaginoplasty. Some of these Cadillacs turn out so successful the flood of colon mucosa means wearing a maxi-pad every day.

  Some are old-style vaginas where you had to stretch and dilate them every day with a plastic mold. All these brochures are souvenirs of Brandy’s near future.

  After we saw Mr. Parker sitting on Ellis, I helped the drug-induced dead body Brandy might as well be back upstairs and took her out of her clothes again. She coughed them back up when I tried to slip any more Darvons down her throat, so I settled her back on the bathroom floor, and when I folded her suit jacket over my arm there was something cardboard tucked in the inside pocket. The Miss Rona book. Tucked in the book is a souvenir of my own future.

  Kicked back on the big ceramic snail shell, I read:

  I love Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I overcompensate by worshipping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me ever again.

  How embarrassing.

  Give me needy emotional whining bullshit.

  Flash.

  Give me self-absorbed egocentric twaddle.

  Christ.

  Fuck me. I’m so tired of being me. Me beautiful. Me ugly. Blond. Brunette. A million fucking fashion makeovers that only leave me trapped being me.

  Who I was before the accident is just a story now. Everything before now, before now, before now, is just a story I carry around. I guess that would apply to anybody in the world. What I need is a new story about who I am.

  What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can’t save myself.

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Twenty-eight

  ump way back to a fashion shoot at this slaughterhouse where whole pigs without their insides hang as thick as fringe from a moving chain. Evie and me wear Bibo Kelley stainless steel party dresses while the chain zips by behind us at about a hundred pigs an hour, and Evie says, “After your brother was mutilated, then what?”

  The photographer looks at his light meter and says, “Nope. No way.”

  The art director says, “Girls, we’re getting too much glare off the carcasses.”

  Each pig goes by big as a hollow tree, all red and shining inside and covered in this really nice pigskin on the outside just after someone’s singed the hair off with a blowtorch. This makes me feel all stubbly by comparison, and I have to count back to my last waxing.

  And Evie goes, “Your brother?”

  And I’m, like, counting Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday . . .

  “How did he go from being mutilated to being dead?” Evie says.

  These pigs keep going by too fast for the art director to powder down their shine. You have to wonder how pigs keep their skin so nice. If now farmers use sunblock or what. Probably, I figure it’s been a month since I was as smooth as they are. The way some salons use their new lasers, even with the cooling gel, they might as well use a blowtorch.

  “Space girl,” Evie says to me. “Phone home.”

  The whole pig place is refrigerated too much to wear a stainless steel dress around. Guys in white A-line coats and boots with low heels get to spray superheated steam in where the pigs insides were, and I’m ready to trade them jobs. I’m ready to trade jobs with the pigs, even. To Evie, I say, “The police wouldn’t buy the hairspray story. They were sure my father had raged on Shane’s face. Or my mom had put the hairspray can in the trash. They called it ‘neglect.’”

  The photographer says, “What if we regroup and backlight the carcasses?”

  “Too much strobe effect as they go past,” the art director says.

  Evie says, “Why’d the police think that?”

  “Beats me,” I say. “Somebody just kept making anonymous calls to them.”

  The photographer says, “Can we stop the chain?”

  The art director says, “Not unless we can stop people from eating meat.”

  We’re still hours away from taking a real break, and Evie says, “Somebody lied to the police?”

  The pig guys are checking us out, and some are pretty cute. They laugh and slide their hands up and down fast on their shiny black steamhoses. Curling their tongues at us. Flirting.

  “Then Shane ran away,” I tell Evie. “Simple as that. A couple years ago, my folks got a call he was dead.”

  We step back as close as we can to the pigs going by, still warm. The floor seems to be really greasy, and Evie starts telling me about an idea she has for a remake of Cinderella, only instead of the little birds and animals making her a dress, they do cosmetic surgery. Bluebirds give her a face-lift. Squirrels give her implants. Snakes, liposuction. Plus, Cinderella starts out as a lonely little boy.

  “As much attention as he got,” I tell Evie, “I’d bet my brother put that hairspray can in the fire himself.”

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Twenty-six

  here had to be some better way to kill Brandy. To set me free. Some quick permanent closure. Some kind of cross fire I could walk away from. Evie hates me by now. Brandy looks just like I used to. Manus is still so in love with Brandy he’d follow her anywhere, even if he’s not sure why. All I’d have to do is get Brandy cross-haired in front of Evie’s rifle.

  Bathroom talk.

  Brandy’s suit jacket with its sanitary little waist and mod three-quarter sleeves is still folded on the aquamarine countertop beside the big clamshell sink. I pick up the jacket, and my souvenir from the future falls out. It’s a postcard of clean, sun-bleached 1962 skies and an opening-day Space Needle. You could look out the bathroom’s porthole windows and see what’s become of the future. Overrun with Goths wearing sandals and soaking lentils at home, the future I wanted is gone. The future I was promised. Everything I expected. The way everything was supposed to turn out. Happiness and peace and love and comfort.

  When did the future, Ellis once wrote on the back of a postcard, switch from being a promise to a threat?

  I tuck the postcard between the vaginoplasty brochures and the labiaplasty handouts stuck between the pages of the Miss Rona book. On the cover is a satellite
photo of Hurricane Blonde just off the West Coast of her face. The blond is crowded with pearls, and what could be diamonds sparkle here and there.

  She looks very happy. I put the book back in the inside pocket of Brandy’s jacket. I pick up the cosmetics and drugs scattered across the countertops and I put them away. Sun comes through the porthole windows at a low, low angle, and the post office will be closing soon. There’s still Evie’s insurance money to pick up. At least a half million dollars, I figure. What you can do with all that money, I don’t know, but I’m sure I’ll find out.

  Brandy’s lapsed into major hair emergency status so I shake her.

  Brandy’s Aubergine Dreams eyes flicker, blink, flicker, squint.

  Her hair, it’s gotten all flat in the back.

  Brandy comes up on one elbow. “You know,” she says, “I’m on drugs so it’s all right if I tell you this.” Brandy looks at me bent over her, offering a hand up. “I have to tell you,” Brandy says, “but I do love you.” She says, “I can’t tell how this is for you, but I want us to be a family.”

  My brother wants to marry me.

  I give Brandy a hand up. Brandy leans on me, Brandy, she leans on the edge of the countertop. She says, “This wouldn’t be a sister thing.” Brandy says, “I still have some days left in my Real Life Training.”

  Stealing drugs, selling drugs, buying clothes, renting luxury cars, taking clothes back, ordering blender drinks, this isn’t what I’d call Real Life, not by a long shot.

  Brandy’s ring-beaded hands open to full flower and spread the fabric of her skirt across her front. “I still have all my original equipment,” she says.

  The big hands are still patting and smoothing Brandy’s crotch as she turns sideways to the mirror and looks at her profile. “It was supposed to come off after a year, but then I met you,” she says. “I had my bags packed in the Congress Hotel for weeks just hoping you’d come to rescue me.” Brandy turns her other side to the mirror and searches. “I just loved you so much, I thought maybe it’s not too late?”

  Brandy spreads pot gloss across her top lip and then her bottom lip, blots her lips on a tissue, and drops the big Plumbago kiss into the snail shell toilet. Brandy says with her new lips, “Any idea how to flush this thing?”

  Hours I sat on that toilet, and no, I never saw how to flush it. I step out into the hallway so if Brandy wants to blab at me she’ll have to follow.

  Brandy stumbles in the bathroom doorway where the tile meets the hallway carpet. Her one shoe, the heel is broken. Her stocking is run where it rubbed the doorframe. She’s grabbed at a towel rack for balance and chipped her nail polish.

  Shining anal queen of perfection, she says, “Fuck.”

  Princess Princess, she yells after me, “It’s not that I really want to be a woman.” She yells, “Wait up!” Brandy yells, “I’m only doing this because it’s just the biggest mistake I can think to make. It’s stupid and destructive, and anybody you ask will tell you I’m wrong. That’s why I have to go through with it.”

  Brandy says, “Don’t you see? Because we’re so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes.” Brandy says, “I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I’ll have to break out and live a real life.”

  Like Christopher Columbus sailing toward disaster at the edge of the world.

  Like Fleming and his bread mold.

  “Our real discoveries come from chaos,” Brandy yells, “from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.”

  Her imperial voice everywhere in the house, she yells, “You do not walk away from me when I take a minute to explain myself!”

  Her example is a woman who climbs a mountain, there’s no rational reason for climbing that hard, and to some people it’s a stupid folly, a misadventure, a mistake. A mountain climber, maybe she starves and freezes, exhausted and in pain for days, and climbs all the way to the top. And maybe she’s changed by that, but all she has to show for it is her story.

  “But me,” Brandy says, still in the bathroom doorway, still looking at her chipped nail polish, “I’m making the same mistake only so much worse, the pain, the money, the time, and being dumped by my old friends, and in the end my whole body is my story.”

  A sexual reassignment surgery is a miracle for some people, but if you don’t want one, it’s the ultimate form of self-mutilation.

  She says, “Not that it’s bad being a woman. This might be wonderful, if I wanted to be a woman. The point is,” Brandy says, “being a woman is the last thing I want. It’s just the biggest mistake I could think to make.”

  So it’s the path to the greatest discovery.

  It’s because we’re so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and two legs everybody has. We’re so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we’re trained to want.

  “My first idea was to have one arm and one leg amputated, the left ones, or the right ones”—she looks at me and shrugs—“but no surgeon would agree to help me.”

  She says, “I considered AIDS, for the experience, but then everybody had AIDS and it looked so mainstream and trendy.” She says, “That’s what the Rhea sisters told my birth family, I’m pretty sure. Those bitches can be so possessive.”

  Brandy pulls a pair of white gloves out of her handbag, the kind of gloves with a white pearl button on the inside of each wrist. She works each hand into a glove and does the button. White is not a good color choice. In white, her hands look transplanted from a giant cartoon mouse.

  “Then I thought, a sex change,” she says, “a sexual reassignment surgery. The Rheas,” she says, “they think they’re using me, but really I’m using them for their money, for their thinking they were in control of me and this was all their idea.”

  Brandy lifts her foot to look at the broken heel, and she sighs. Then she reaches down to take off the other shoe.

  “None of this was the Rhea sisters’ pushing. It wasn’t. It was just the biggest mistake I could make. The biggest challenge I could give myself.”

  Brandy snaps the heel off her one good shoe, leaving her feet in two ugly flats.

  She says, “You have to jump into disaster with both feet.”

  She throws the broken heels into the bathroom trash.

  “I’m not straight, and I’m not gay,” she says. “I’m not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don’t want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, someplace to be that’s not on the map. A real adventure.”

  A sphinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined. Unknowable. Indefinable. Those were all the words Brandy used to describe me in my veils. Not just a story that goes and then, and then, and then, and then until you die.

  “When I met you,” she says, “I envied you. I coveted your face. I thought that face of yours will take more guts than any sex change operation. It will give you bigger discoveries. It will make you stronger than I could ever be.”

  I start down the stairs. Brandy in her new flats, me in my total confusion, we get to the foyer, and through the drawing room doors you can hear Mr. Parker’s long, deep voice belching over and over, “That’s right. Just do that.”

  Brandy and me, we stand outside the doors a moment. We pick the lint and toilet paper off each other, and I fluff up the flat back of Brandy’s hair. Brandy pulls her pantyhose up her legs a little and tugs down the front of her jacket.

  The postcard and the book tucked inside her jacket, the dick tucked in her pantyhose, you can’t tell either one’s there.

  We throw open the drawing room double doors and there’s Mr. Parker and Ellis. Mr. Parker’s pants are around his knees, his bare hairy ass is stuck up in the air. The rest of his bareness is stuck in Ellis’s face. Ellis Island, formerly Independent Special Contract Vice Operative Manus Kelley.

  “Oh, yes. Just do that. That’s so good
.”

  Ellis’s getting an A in job performance, his hands are cupped around Parker’s football scholarship power-clean bare buns, pulling everything he can swallow into his square-jawed Nazi-poster-boy face. Ellis grunting and gagging, making his comeback from forced retirement.

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Twenty-four

  e all know the scene in the classic movie, the David Lynch masterpiece, but Daisy’s version was better. How Daisy St. Patience remembered the movie, it wasn’t even sepia-toned. The setting was still an auditorium filled with row upon row of tiered seats, standing-room-only crowded, that full house of straightlaced, Victorian nobility. Ladies in bustles. Men in tall silk hats. Everyone hushed with anticipation. They were all staring intently at a screen of cloth stretched over a lightweight frame, the type of screen used to separate beds in old hospital wards. But when that screen slid aside to reveal an almost naked figure . . . Daisy’s interpretation was better.